This application makes reference to, incorporates the same herein, and claims all benefits accruing under 35 U.S.C. xc2xa7xc2xa7119 and 120 from an application entitled Method For Graphically Outputting Status of Trunk in Switching System earlier filed in the Korean Industrial Property Office on Jul. 7, 1998, and there duly assigned Serial No. 98-27243.
1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to a switching system and, more particularly, to an apparatus and method for graphically outputting the status of a trunk in a switching system.
2. Related Art
In a conventional switching system, the status of a trunk has been output in text form. That is, a personal computer (PC) for managing the trunk has searched for a subsystem installed in the switching system by commands, and has output the status of a corresponding trunk in text form. The status of the trunk can take about 30 forms such as busy, idle, MMC block, fault block, access fail, and the like. If the status of the trunk is changed, a speech path management block is informed of the changed information. The speech path management block then updates the trunk information. Trunk busy information is updated in a library of a call related block. If an operator requests output of the status of the trunk by MMC commands, the speech path management block retrieves trunk status information and trunk busy information from the library.
However, in such a method for outputting the status of the trunk in text form, it is not easy for an operator to know the status of the trunk because it varies with time and because the speech path management block outputs corresponding information only when the operator inputs commands. Furthermore, when data over 4K per subsystem is output in text form, it may be difficult to detect the occurrence of an error in the trunk and the output of the data may delayed. For example, assuming that the maximum amount of data for a trunk installed in one subsystem is 4K, the amount of on-line transmission data will be 20K if there are just 5 subsystems. Consequently, the load on the switching system and the number of nodes increase due to excessive data transmission.
The conventional method for outputting the status of the trunk in text form does not always include status information as to all trunks. Therefore, in some cases, there is no status information on the trunk per link.
The following patents are considered to be representative of the prior art, but are burdened by the disadvantages discussed herein:
U.S. Pat. No. 5,909,217 for Large Scale System Status Map issued to Bereiter; U.S. Pat. No. 5,751,965 for Network Connection Status Monitor and Display issued to Mayo et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,606,664 for Apparatus and Method for Automatically Determining the Topology of a Local Area Network issued to Brown et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,559,955 for Method and Apparatus for Monitoring the Status of Non-Pollable Device in a Computer Network issued to Dev et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,504,921 for Network Management System Using Model-Based Intelligence issued to Dev et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,465,286 for Apparatus for Supervising an Automatic Call Distribution Telephone System issued to Clare et al.; U.S. Pat. No. 5,437,009 for Method and System for Displaying Status Information of Communications Networks issued to Lane; U.S. Pat. No. 5,392,395 for Image Editing System for Transmission Network Supervision issued to Fujii et al.; and U.S. Pat. No. 4,734,933 for Telephone Line Status Circuit issued to Barsellott et al.
It is, therefore, an object of the present invention to provide an apparatus and method for graphically outputting the status of a trunk in a switching system.
According to an aspect of the present invention, an apparatus and method for graphically outputting the status of a trunk in a switching system provide a PC, a graphics data management block, a traffic resource management block, a status management block, and a trunk control block, and include the function or steps of: receiving trunk installation information from the graphics data management block in response to selection of a trunk status graphics mode, and displaying the received trunk installation information on a main window; if a specific trunk is selected from among the displayed trunk installation information, receiving the status information and busy information of the selected trunk from the graphics data management block, and displaying the received status information and busy information on a corresponding subwindow; if there are trunk status information and busy information generated on line from the selected trunk, automatically receiving the on-line trunk status information and the on-line busy information from the graphics data management block, and updating and displaying the on-line trunk status information and the on-line busy information on the corresponding subwindow; and receiving trunk status statistical data from the graphics data management block in response to a statistical data request signal, and displaying the received statistical data on a corresponding window.